Democratization of the Senses – Senses of Democracy: Emancipation as Experience of Equality in Hierarchical Otherwise Sensorial Spaces

An International and Transdisciplinary Conference Organized by the Department of Sports Science and Motologie and the Department of Studies in Culture and History

April 4 – 6, 2025 at the University of Marburg

Recent studies from Radical Democracy Theory have not only critiqued the reduction of democratic processes to a representative, juridico-economic, or institutional act (cf. Agamben 2012:12; Balibar 2012; Mouffe 2005), but have paved the way for an ontic framing of “the democratic” itself. Politics, then, is no longer understood as a mere space of negotiation, as a “system of producing and deploying collectively binding decisions” (Comtesse et al. 2019; Friedrichs 2021: 24). The focus shifts to the epistemic institutions that precede democracy and the political (cf. Friedrichs 2021: 24; Rancière 2016; Rancière 2002; Abbas 2019; Marchart 2019). Particularly those discourses on democratic theory that follow Jacques Rancière seek to understand democracy as holistic process. Concepts like “democracy of the senses” (Butler 2010), “sensory citizenship” (Trnka et al. 2013), “senses of democracy” (Masiello 2018), “democracy as sensual space” (Dietrich 2022: 90), “political aesthesis” (Friedrichs 2021), “posthumanist democracy as a form of life” (Spahn/Wieners 2023), or the understanding of the pollical field as “somato-sensorial gestalt” (Linke 2006) point toward a novel understanding of democracy.

Such approaches focus on the sensual prerequisites for the existence of a space for negotiations among equals and on the question which (non-human) actors are excluded from it. Moreover, they question a concept of understanding that is built exclusively on rational thinking. Jacques Rancière’s often cited phrase of a “(new) division of the sensual” (Ranciere 2008; 2008a; 2016) can thus be taken as call for the further integration of a somatic-sensual dimension into the discourse on democracy and participation. The interdisciplinary conference aims to explore how a sensual-meaningful, socio-somatic understanding of the democratic as a form of experience may look like (without furthering a dichotomy of logos and sensus). If indeed sensual perception and, consequently, the experience of relations of power and domination differ among social groups and if, in turn, political life is constituted by using the senses (cf. Ranciere 2002; 2008; 2008a; 2016; Bünger/Trautmann 2012; Trnka u.a. 2013; Vannini u.a. 2014; Kwek/Sefert 2016), then we must pay attention to a democratization of the senses in everyday social and political practices to account for the senses of democracy. The perception of different cultural constructions in social movement contexts and their somaticsensual inscriptions is only made possible by the existence of democracy. For this reason, democracy is a primordial precondition for dissident somatic reflections.

The conference will focus on the question if and how the late-capitalist, Western modular and hierarchical understanding of the senses as (intertwined) expression of ocular-, logo-, androand anthropo-centrism (cf. Howes 2006; Mraczny 2012; Kwek/Seyfert 2016; Hubermann 2023) entails a hierarchical pre-structuring of the democratic political field. Visual culture, for example, produces “specific practices, discourses, and ways of speaking that encompass various fields and privilege them before others” (Marzny 2012, 197).

At the same time, it becomes apparent that an understanding of democracy that considers the logos as superior to the sensus, excludes the articulation of somatic-affective discomfort from the democratic sensorium. The non-human Other is thus all but silenced.

Equally little research has been done on the sensual-somatic basis of the animation of collective affects in both human and non-human contexts. The question arises how these affects produce a sensorium in a possibly discriminating way and how they are involved in sensorial-sensual processes of ordering and dividing (Slaby 2019; Ahmed 2004, 2014; Bucher 2017, 2018; Beer 2017).

For this reason, the conference will focus on the analysis of the hegemonic use of the senses, particularly the visual sense. It aims to explore avenues toward a democratization of the senses through the irritation of the visual sense by the deployment of other senses.

Based on our assumption that political emancipation hinges less on marginalized groups’ lack of knowledge than on their lack of opportunity to gain diverse experiences (cf. Rancière 2016), the conference also aims to open an egalitarian space of speech and experience. Equality is understood in terms of “enabling the juxtaposition of two voices” (Ranciere 2008, 11) and as the “fact of mutual understanding” (ibid., 14). The conference will provide hierarchically-different sensorial spaces and situations, thus creating, as we hope, a condition for political emancipation. This arrangement enables the sensorial perception in bodily interiors and interstices as a political public where sensorial inequality is collectively negotiated. We ask, how can we come to terms with the sensually and socially hierarchical distinction between meaning and the senses, as well as with the production of diverse sensual situations (not only) among humans? And how can strategies toward achieving a sensually accessible emancipation be developed?

The conference format seeks to deconstruct dominant visual structures. We explicitly ask for multi-sensorial contributions like audio walks, sound installations and interjections, collective walks, and conversations. Lecture performances are equally welcome as sensorimotor and perception-oriented field trips, both with and without experiences of touch, considering and negotiating sensual-affective boundaries. To experiment with sensual didactics and irritate the fond habit of following the order of “eyes-seeing-thinking”, we discourage the classical lecture format and the showing of visual material in favor of otherwise-sensorial approaches. Please submit abstracts of maximal two pages or an audio format alike by Oct. 15th, 2024 to wuttiguni-marburgde and ellen.thumauni-marburgde.